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The Crash: Chapter Thirteen (in which the book justifies its title)

After a week's intermission, The Crash is back. This week, we leave Jason and Brad working on their improvements to the car part manufacturing process, and spend some time instead with Jason's teenaged daughter, Jess.

"Nice,"
Jess said, walking around Bethany's shiny, pink new car and taking in
the alloy wheels, the body-coloured wing mirrors and bumper, the
parking sensors and the complicated stereo. She was, after all, her
father's daughter. Where most of her friends noticed only their
colour, she knew cars. And this was one to envy.

"Come
on," Chloe said, tapping her fingers on her mock-Gucci handbag
as she waited for her friend to finish admiring the vehicle, and get
inside.

"OK,
OK," Jess agreed, taking a careful step inside. The car was a
little too small for her to get into easily, and her new cream high
heels made it awkward stepping over the sill, but once inside, she
could stretch out comfortably.

"Really
nice," she confirmed, and Bethany smiled and turned the key in
the ignition. The engine turned over smoothly, the music came on, and the girls began singing along to 'The Best of the Musicals.'

"Which
parts are you going for?" Jess asked the other girls, mentally
running down the list of major roles in the musical for which they
were auditioning. Jess wanted the part of Cordelia, a glamorous
actress whose father owned the theatre, but repudiated her for
chasing widespread fame instead of critical acclaim. Chloe was
auditioning for both Cordelia and her middle sister Georgie, since
she couldn't decide which she preferred, and Bethany was set on the
part of the youngest sister, an opera singer. There was a part for
each of them, but a wild card in the form of the two other girls
who'd taken chorus parts last year but were stepping up to audition
for lead parts now.

"We'll
get the parts, no sweat. We've been around longer. We're better,"
Chloe said encouragingly as Bethany pulled into the middle lane of
the three-lane ring road, preparing to turn right into the city
centre and head for the theatre.

"I
wish I'd done my hair at home," she fretted, sneaking a look in
the rear-view mirror at her vivid red locks.

"That
won't take long," Bethany pointed out, swinging round the bend
at perhaps a slightly higher speed than she should have done.

"True,"
Jess said, thinking that it was a pity the group was so
female-dominated. Mind you, in view of that, 'The Lear Theatre' was
the perfect musical for them. An updating of the Shakespeare play,
its theatrical setting ensured glamour aplenty, while three of the
four major roles were taken by young women. Abby, the theatre
group's chair, seemed to have picked the show specifically with the
girls in mind. Well, and the one grizzled older man who would be
perfect as their aging and traditionalist father.

Abby
said the show had only been picked because the rights were available
and cheap, and it was something out of the ordinary, but Jess chose
to believe that it also had something to do with the range of parts
and the fact that she and Bethany were perfectly placed to play the
showgirl and the serious musician, while Giles was a given as their
father.

"Why
are they even auditioning Giles?" she asked aloud.

Chloe
laughed.

"It
would be rude not to," she pointed out.

Bethany
nodded and indicated left.

"Loads
of time," she said, smugly, pulling off the ring road into the
city centre street, only to come up against a pothole that shook the
car's suspension right through and caused Jess to wince in pain at
the jolt to her spine.

"Ow.
Mind out," she snapped, and immediately regretted her
grumpiness. The state of the roads wasn't Bethany's fault, and she
indignantly said as much.

"I
know," Jess said, immediately contrite.

"What's
that?" Chloe asked.

"What's
what?" Bethany turned into the car park of the church hall where
they held their early rehearsals.

"That
noise?" Chloe shushed the girls and listened carefully.

"What
noise?"

"It's
stopped now. There was a creak."

"Something
settling in, I suppose," Bethany suggested. "You can get
that with new cars."

"Something
breaking, after that run-in with the pothole, more like." Chloe
voiced what Jess had been thinking.

"Don't
be daft. Come on." Bethany swung into the last parking space
in the row, turned out the lights and tucked the satnav in the glove box. Jess wondered how long that habit would last. Security was
all very well until it caused any inconvenience, and then it tended
to go out of the window.

"Coming."
Jess got out and flipped the seat forward to let Chloe out of the
rear seat.

The
three of them went round to the boot and took out their handbags and
the vanity cases they rarely went anywhere without.

"Lear
Theatre, here we come."

"We're
off to see the theatre," Chloe sang, to the tune of 'We're off
to see the wizard', linking her arms in Jess's and Bethany's and
dragging them into the simple dance routine that they all remembered
from their time in the chorus of the kids' shows. 'Wizard of Oz' had
been a perennial favourite, but Jess was glad to be doing something
different - and a bit more sophisticated and challenging - this year.

Since
the upstairs hall where they rehearsed was being used for the
auditions, the coffee room off the main church had been pressed into
service as a waiting room.

The
three girls huddled in a corner refreshing their make-up and running
through their lines while the boys were auditioning.

"I'm
so nervous," Chloe chattered.

"You'll
be fine," the two others reassured her in chorus.

"I
just wish they were doing the girls first so we could get it over
with."

"I'm
glad to have the extra time to learn my lines," Jess countered.
"I've been that busy with college assignments this week, I
haven't had time to get them properly in my mind."

"Dave
said we could use scripts," Chloe pointed out, but Jess was
determined to have her hands free. It was so hard to convey a
character properly when you were walking around with a handful of
rustling sheets.

By
the time the last of the four men came downstairs, she was fairly
confident she had her lines down pat.

Once
the audition panel had finished discussing the casting of the men,
Jess was called first. A mixed blessing: it was nice to get it over
with, but then she knew she'd sit downstairs replaying all the most
cringe-making moments in her head while the others went through their
scenes.

"Thank
you for seeing me," she smiled to the audition panel. It never
hurt to be polite.

Four
stern faces stared back at her, giving nothing away. Even Abby, the
normally friendly chair, was unsmiling under her blonde bob. The
musical director was always scary anyway, and he looked at Jess over
his half-framed glasses and demanded to know whether she wanted to do
the song or scene first.

"Song,
please," she said, and positioned herself in the middle of the
floor ready to show off.

The
music echoed oddly in the too-large hall, without an audience to
absorb the sound. Jess was thrown by singing to the piano instead of
a backing tape, and started half a beat late, but once she settled
into the song, she was pleased with the way her voice filled the
room.

"We
could hear you from down here," Bethany told her afterwards, in
a whisper, while Chloe was auditioning.

"No
way! How did it sound?"

"Brilliant,
but then you always do."

"Flatterer."

"It's
not flattery if it's true. You know you're good. You're the best of
us for musicals. I'm lucky that this one's got an operatic aria in
it."

They
fell to discussing the different parts and the songs involved, until
Chloe came down and joined them, and then they collected up their
papers and make-up cases and headed back out to the car.

Once
again, Chloe scrambled into the back, and Jess took her place beside
Bethany in the front.

"I
love this car," Bethany grinned, flipping a button on the steering wheel so that the gentle music which had been playing was replaced
with blaring rock. "Woo hoo," she squealed. "We've
got it, I know it."

"I
don't know," Jess hedged, as Bethany pulled out of the gate and
joined the steady stream of traffic heading down the hill and out of
town. "There's Lana and Ellie."

"I
know. They're new, and they're nice and all but we're the stars.
And all our auditions went well, you said so yourself."

"I
suppose. I just don't want to count my chickens."

"Bwaaark,
bwaark." Chloe made chicken noises from the back of the car,
making Bethany laugh uproriously.

Then
her scream of laughter turned to a scream of fear. Jess looked up
from the handbag she'd been fiddling with, to see that the car was
hurtling down the hill, despite Bethany's frantic pressure on the
brake pedal.

Everything
seemed to happen very fast then. Bethany started yanking the wheel
in an attempt to avoid the lorry. The car swerved towards the
pavement, then hit the kerb with a loud bang, which Jess just had
time to interpret as a burst tyre, when the car spun back into the
road again, speeding towards the back of the lorry. Jess reached for
the handbrake in a last desperate attempt to stave off the approach
of the lorry, but it was too late.

There
was metal coming towards her, a huge sharp-edged steely girder, and
she just had time to duck her head before the bonnet went under the
lorry's rear end, the windscreen hit the lorry chassis and exploded
into a million tiny pieces, and there was a huge, echoing crunching
of panels all around her. She just had time to notice that Bethany’s
screaming had stopped, and wonder whether that was a good or a bad
thing. Then her perceptions of the world disappeared, blocked out by
an overwhelming pain.

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